To the dwarves it read as forge-light. To the royal guard on the guests’ bench, who had spent the whole day re-learning her Holy Son one impossibility at a time, it read as one more thing that would never fit in her report.
Quinlan felt the draw on the reservoir like a hand squeezing his heart, and approved of it pletely, feeding the bellows while his smith pulled deep and struck true.
’Lucille and the others have already started topping it back off,’ he mused, a small, private smile tugging at his mouth.
The weld closed. Clean. Somewhere in their shelves, several venerable treatises quietly became fiction, and the roar that went up shook soot from rafters that had kept their peace for generations.
Sweat ran down Kaelira’s spine and gathered along the ridges of her abs, her shoulder-length hair sticking to her neck, violet eyes reflecting forge-light. She’d never in her life been more purely herself. The work sang under her hands like it had never once sung in the hidden forge she’d almost died for.
And her man worked the bellows for her.
That was the part the smithy would never stop talking about, long after the details of the folding blurred. The Conqueror of the Continent, half-naked and soot-streaked, sweat sheeting down a physique that belonged on a war monument, pumping the bellows of a mid-tier forge to a rhythm nobody had heard anyone give him.
He fed her coals, fetched her flux, held the billet steady for the punishing folds, and did it all with visible, shameless pride, watching his lover conquer a mountain of her own.
Elowen, on her bench, was no longer entirely certain what she believed about anything. The dread of him had drained out of the hall somewhere in the last hour, and what filled the vacancy had no precedent in her training. He was sweat and soot and monstrous ease, hauling a bellows-arm that took four dwarves on a normal shift, laughing at whatever the terrifying First Hammer growled.
Firelight moved over the muscles of his back like the light had opinions. Elowen realized she had been staring for some time, and made no move to stop.
Her posture melted by degrees from parade attention into something that belonged on a tavern bench. A dwarven apprentice offered her water. She drank it without checking it for anything.
"He is..." she began, to no one.
"Mm~ he is," Seraphiel agreed warmly, from right beside her, and Elowen jolted hard enough to slop the water. The Holy Son’s first elf had settled onto the same bench at some point, chin propped on her palm, thoroughly enjoying both shows at once. "Terrible, isn’t it? He does this everywhere we go. You spend an hour deciding what he is, and then he ruins your notes."
"I have no idea whatever you might be talking about," Elowen said, with enormous dignity, watching him wipe his forearm across his brow.
"Is that so~"
It was the question that finally pulled the First Hammer off the forge’s edge. Brokk crossed to the guests’ bench, planted herself in front of the lounging first elf with her arms folded, and asked it with the growl scraped down to honest bafflement.
"The crown’s rack stood open to her. Adamantite. Cores no hammer alive has been granted, and she walked past them for hearth-steel and cart-spring iron." Her eyes never left the forge. "Why."
"What do you mean~? Kaeli already said it, weren’t you paying attention?" Seraphiel’s purring reached new heights, enjoying her role in this showoff. "Those two have a rule about the good stuff. The piece has to deserve the metal, and today’s..." she gestured at the forge, at the sweat and the fire and the impossible weld, with the same lazy warmth she’d give a picnic spread, "...just a quick little piece to show off, basically. They don’t spend adamantite on a souvenir."
Brokk stared at her.
Then she looked back at the forge, at the one craftsman in two bodies, at the lamination her hall’s treatises called impossible, at the salute still rolling around the tiers, and did the math every master in earshot was doing whether they wanted to or not.
That was the doodle. Then what was them being serious?!
As if perfectly reading the dwarf’s thoughts, Seraphiel pointed toward Quinlan with one dainty finger. "She is~"
Or, to be more specific, she was pointing at the towel soaking up sweat on her half-naked lover, the garment that was previously his armor.
"...Ancestors preserve us," the First Hammer said, with feeling, and went back to her post. Then she caught herself. "Wait, she?"
"She has too much personality to be a mere thing, so Quin decided Synchra was a female," Sera giggled.
"..." A hundred butts suddenly found the nearest seat, which, for many, turned out to be the ground itself.
The forging ran on for the better part of an hour. When the folding was done and the shape emerged, a hammer head, drift-punched and true, the layered grain of three humble metals flowing through its faces like current-lines in dark water, Kaelira laid the newborn craft down on the anvil’s face with both hands, careful as a midwife, and squared it to the light.
Then she straightened, chest heaving, and tossed her own working hammer backward over her shoulder without so much as a glance. "Quin."
Quinlan was already there.
He plucked the tool out of the air mid-stride, and the hall understood the gesture at once, because it was a smith calling in her finisher.
What the hall did not understand was what he did next, which was give the venerable forge hammer a lazy flip.
Then another. Then a slow spin across the back of his hand, the tool of the sacred craft twirling like a street performer’s baton as the half-naked giant strolled up to a newborn masterwork like he was arriving at breakfast.
The temperature of the room’s respect dropped tier by tier. Masters’ eyes narrowed all around the hall. Swagger. Actual swagger, in the royal smithy.
"He’d better not..."
"If he ruins her piece playing circus, powerful villain or not..."
Dain’s knuckles had gone white on his cane. Brokk said nothing, but her thumbs came out of her belt.
The hammer stopped spinning at the top of one last insolent flip, his right arm flaring with veins and hand settling onto the haft in a grip that was suddenly, chillingly correct, and came down square on the newborn head.
*CLANG!*
The sound went through the hall’s bones, but it was nothing beside what came with it.
Quinlan’s eyes ignited, all seven elements burning in them at once, flame and tide and gale and stone and frost and storm and magma, and light in the same seven colors detonated down the hammer’s path and poured into the steel.
This was no smithing blow. Raw mana crushed itself into the newborn head, pressed under the strike until it folded into the grain along every rune-channel his smith had laid, and the anvil screamed under a pressure it had never been asked to hold.
The wash of it rolled off him in a visible tide, and the whole front rank of masters took an involuntary step back.
"Ancestors above! What is that output?!"
"He’s pouring his entire pool into ONE STRIKE?!?! Is he dumb?!"
An old rune-master on the second tier was doing frantic arithmetic on his fingers. "Nobody sustains that. Three more of those and he’s dry, I don’t care what he is..."
*CLANG!*
"Two more!"
*CLANG!*
"That’s it, he’s done, no man alive..."
Quinlan, mid-swing, took a sharp breath.
The hall felt it before it saw it. The mountain’s deep mana turned like a tide reversing, bending toward the man at the anvil from every direction at once, wisps of it going faintly luminous as they crossed the last span to his skin and sank in.
He was refilling. In plain sight, mid-work, sweat sheeting down his back, the deepest well any of them had ever stood near topping itself back up like a spring, and then the hammer rose again and the seven-colored blaze rose with it.
*CLANG!*
The rune-master sat down on the stairs.
"That’s not a mortal being..." someone said faintly from the rails. "That’s a calamity in human skin."
"No wonder our armies lost..."
"Unbelievable..."
"Someone wake me up!"
It became a rhythm, and the rhythm became the kind of spectacle that gets embellished for a century despite needing no embellishment: strike, blaze, the impossible expenditure, the breath, the tide of power crawling home across his skin, strike again. Magic, smithing, and raw endurance braided into a single act, performed at full burn by Quinlan, sweating like a dockhand and enjoying himself with a satisfied grin all master smiths recognized, the expression you made when you felt fully in control of your work.
And then, while the hall was still reeling, the elf walked into the blast radius.
"My part’s done..."
Kaelira crossed the floor at her own unhurried pace, stepped through a mana-wash that had the front row shielding their beards, and wrapped herself around her lover from behind: arms sliding around his waist, palms spreading flat over the ridges of his abs, cheek ing to rest between his shoulder blades. It was his own hold, given back.
Except he had grinned through his version, loudly proud of himself, embracing what was his without a care for who watched.
Kaelira’s face stayed buried against his spine, hidden from the entire hall, and the only part of her that confessed anything was her ears, which twitched once, hard, and then kept twitching, broadcasting to the upper tiers everything her hidden face refused to.
The hall noticed her one section at a time, conversations dying mid-word.
"Is... is she doing it now?"
"She is."
"The mana-wash! It’ll cook her..."
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